13 October 2020

Editor’s Note: Marlow brings his sense of place and time to these curious dreamscapes approaching the election. It may be an important one, from what I have heard. Certainly there will be more cheerful chaos to come.

– Vic

Author’s Note: This draft appeared to me in my dreamscapes. I may be over my skies in speaking for your crew of scribes. So, I leave its eventual disposition to your editorial senses.

– Marlow

Dog Tags

2020 has been a competition of harrowing, visceral, ultra-sci-fi-realistic, emotionally shattering, first draft movie versions of a Word War. These scripts are based on their writers’ and actors’ second-hand knowledge as political combat-worthy desk-soldiers (aka REMFs, or Rear Area you know what’s).

Each of these harsh, frightening, and unflinching guerrilla war campaigns was designed to sharply contrast with the other side’s fake depiction of America’s Word War — both the John Wayne view of the US and the anti-incumbent’s dreamy axes for grinding us.

This sure hasn’t been no Full Metal Jacket or Hamburger Hill movie tale.

Both were inauthentic as hell creations of US citizen-grunt peon’s experience and their hopes for the future.

These competing, brutally-insincere, dramatic narratives said more about America’s disconnection from the truth and facts than the final death throes of its innocent citizens’ trust in its leadership class. The Socotra Publishing House scribes have striven to provide their readers a voice-over narration of this Word War in a seeming series of letters much like those we wrote to our families 40, 50 or more years ago when we sailed the troubled waters of a long over Cold War and the assorted shadow antiterrorist operations that remain unknown many decades later.

Many times, the telling of these harrowing and disorienting tales involved dozens of F-swords and other cursing that was then (and remains now) typical of real war’s murkily dark battle spaces.

These Word War scripts are not some Rambo-style adventure or noble mission. The first casualty of this war was the conjoined Siamese twins — Truth and Facts.

2020’s war opened with us citizen-recruits’ confusion, exhaustion, and fear of the chaos and a novel threat of death with the arrival on America’s shores of the Plague. Your scribes’ stories focused on the struggles between two wanna-be father figures, as their minions conducted search-and-destroy missions as they battled over the votes of us green, fresh meat recruits. With just three weeks to go before election day many have yet to figure out if there’s a real good guy, or at least who’s the lesser bad guy. Sorta like buying clothing without trying them on. Sadly, we can’t return them, once we buy them.

Maybe we’ll find out when one of them on election night adopts the crucifixion pose as he declares victory or concedes defeat as America emerges from its quadrennial political jungle. Just kidding.

Which loser’s dog tags will we take as we didi-mau evac ourselves from this hot political free fire zone on election night?

Post-election night prayer:

Rejoice, Americans, in thy nation’s youth
and let thy hearts cheer thee in the days of its post electoral night rebirth
and walk in the virtuous ways of its heart
and in the clear sight of its eyes
but know, thou newly elected, we the voters,
for all the coming things you will bring, will bring you into judgment.

Copyright © 2020 From My Isle Seat
www.vicsocotra.com